


Verbum caro factum est

by emjee (MerryHeart)



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Christmas, Gen, Introspection, Prayer, brief references to canon-typical violence, religious observance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:41:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28252563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MerryHeart/pseuds/emjee
Summary: Nine centuries of observing Christmas has given Nicky quite a bit of time to ponder the mystery of the Incarnation.
Comments: 45
Kudos: 167





	Verbum caro factum est

**Author's Note:**

> Should you wish to listen to some tunes while you read this, I offer you [a half-hour playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0xkc8FY2lX1hXy3jXDk7Gv) of medieval music for Christmas and relevant to Christmas.

“Et verbum caro factum est, et habitavit in nobis.”

Nicolò pauses, instead of continuing to the next Ave Maria. He opens his eyes to stare at his hands. _The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us_.

He has come to know his own flesh quite thoroughly in the last two centuries. Has come to know the many ways it can be broken.

He doesn’t know what is different, why this catches him unaware today of all days, when he has said this prayer for the majority of his two hundred years of life, but he stares at his hands for he does not know how long, repeating the phrase to himself in every language he knows, and only when his eyes begin to close with exhaustion does he remember to move on to _Ave Maria, gratia plena_.

*

_When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all his angels with him, then he will sit on his throne of glory._

This is the beginning of the story he repeats to himself when he is waiting for death to claim him, when the pain is blinding and he wants to cry out for the oblivion that will give him some relief, however temporary, however terrifying. (Anything that takes him away from Yusuf is terrifying.)

_Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.”_

Nicolò has done horrific things in the name of that kingdom. _Forgive me_ , he would plead, back when every death felt like penance, _forgive me for such a desecration of your Name_.

It is 1917, the third year of a war that was famously supposed to be finished by its first Christmas. Nicolò and Yusuf are working as battlefield medics while Andromache and Booker are imbedded in various intelligence operations designed to bring the interminable slaughter to an end.

_For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink._

His lungs are burning again; he cannot see. He grasps in the chaos around him and there is Yusuf, there are Yusuf’s hands. His breathing is also wrong, choked off. They would scream, but they cannot get the air.

_I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing._

They were not on the Western Front for the Christmas of 1914. Nicolò cannot decide if he wishes they had been.

 _I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me_.

After this death, he thinks, they should leave the battlefield and install themselves in a hospital. There is an influenza tearing through the continent, however much the wartime censors would like everyone to think it is confined to Spain. He has died from hunger, from thirst, from blood loss and broken necks and poison, he is about to die from asphyxiation and chemical burns, but he has never died of disease. He will mention this to Yusuf, once they…once they are…to Yusuf…Yusuf…

*

Nicolò has been whipped before. So has God. It’s a curious thing to contemplate.

He’s had wounds go through his hands and through his feet, but never all at the same time. He’s been speared in the side too many times to count.

 _You saw us,_ Nicolò once prayed, during one of his more protracted battlefield deaths, eyes fixed on an endless blue sky, hand reaching out for Yusuf, always reaching. _You saw us and our multitudes of pain and you came to us, people heard your voice, people touched your hands, you healed us and you taught us and one day, one day you will have to explain to me why you left_.

*

He has spent a fair number of Christmases in refugee camps. When steadier weather returns to the Mediterranean, their army of four has decided, they’re piloting a boat.

It is the nature of their lives, he knows, that he and Yusuf cannot have children. No parents are meant to outlive their babies, and knowing at the outset that they would makes the thought nearly unbearable.

Nearly.

Nicolò watches Yusuf lift a little boy onto his shoulders. Jesus, Nicolò thinks, was once the size of that boy. Did his mother carry him like that, when he was small? Did his mother’s husband, who shares a name with Nicolò’s?

When they fled, they held their son as tightly as this boy’s parents will hold him when they travel toward safer shores. Nicolò does not have to wonder about that.

*

He has attended midnight Christmas services in every part of the world where a church can be found, in the most magnificent cathedrals built by human hands and in the smallest village parishes, also built by human hands, and with as much love. He has been an anonymous voice in a great congregation, face illuminated by candlelight as the priest sings in Latin, or Greek, or Syriac; he has prepared feasts for his little family to share in the small hours of the morning; he has been welcomed into the homes of people he barely knows.

He has spent an equal number of Christmases crawling through dust and dirt and blood, unaware of the exact date.

This year it’s just him and Joe, very far north and very remote. The nearest church is farther than Nicky would like to travel, and he isn’t in the mood to contend with a sermon he might be frustrated with. Always a wild card, the sermons.

They’ve used this cabin regularly for the last two hundred years, at least. They can’t swear that they’re the only ones who knows it exists, but that doesn’t matter. They keep it in good enough repair, possibly with the help of people who stay there unbeknownst to them. Nicky likes that they are part of a place that is there for whoever needs it.

It is nearly midnight.

“Would you like me to stay up with you?” Joe asks, as Nicky sets candles on the coffee table. The only other light comes from a pair of gas lanterns and the open door of the wood stove.

“You’re sweet to offer, my heart, but I won’t be long. Go warm the bed for me?”

“Gladly.” Joe kisses him, soft and lingering, and disappears into their small bedroom, taking one of the gas lanterns with him.

Nicky strikes a match (there is something he will always love about the sound, the flare) and lights the candles.

This feast is not meant to be spent alone—no feast is—but he has enough practice at it that he’s formed his own rough liturgy.

“Judah and Jerusalem, fear not nor be dismayed,” he sings. “Tomorrow go ye forth, and the Lord he will be with you. Stand ye still and ye shall see the salvation of our God: tomorrow go ye forth and the Lord he will be with you.”

He fills a small thrill in the pit of his stomach, the same as he feels when he’s in a crowded church and the choir begins to sing in the darkness. He recites the Te Deum next, then sings Corde natus and Puer nobis. He’s sorry he can’t receive the Eucharist, but in this circumstance it can’t be helped. He closes his eyes to the candlelight and calls to mind a midnight Mass at the cathedral in Assisi; he’s forgotten the date but he can see in his mind’s eye the bishop at the great crossing proclaiming the Prologue to the Gospel of John.

Nicky begins to recite the lesson in Greek. It is possibly his favorite passage of Scripture; he’s memorized it in every language he knows. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God…”

There is so much he doesn’t know, and after nearly nine hundred years of being alive he easily admits that there is much he is probably wrong about. To put it another way, the chances that he is right about everything are laughably small. He worries about that much less than he used to.

“And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, and we have beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

He ends by singing In dulci jublio, which he has loved ever since he first heard it in the fourteenth century. The mystic who wrote it was said to have learned it from angels. Nicky can believe it.

Joe is still awake when he climbs in to bed shortly after. “Happy Christmas,” Joe says, tucking himself against Nicky’s back.

“Thank you, my love.”

“Were you okay welcoming it alone?”

“For this year.”

“We could try to be in Thessaloniki next year. Or Moscow. Or Guadalajara.”

“All of those sound lovely.”

He feels Joe press a kiss to the back of his neck. This is how he knows God, immortal, invisible, unknowable: through the pain his body has known, but even more so through its pleasure. Through the flare of a match, through a table crowded with food and people, through Joe’s body curled around his own. Through Joe, full stop.

For this year, that is enough.

*

_Then the righteous will answer him, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?” And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”_

**Author's Note:**

> A few words on the various texts referenced here (I’ll try not to make this longer than the actual fic):
> 
> Nicky is praying the Angelus in the first scene; it’s speculated that the prayer is as old as the eleventh century, which makes it as old as Nicky, and the first written record we have of it is from thirteenth century Franciscans. (I will save my headcanons about Nicky and the Franciscans for another time.)
> 
> The second scene and the end tag are from the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. 
> 
> “Judah and Jerusalem, fear not nor be dismayed” is used by Anglicans as a vesper responsory during Advent, and I grew up with it as the responsory for Christmas Eve as well. I’m sure other denominations use it but I had trouble sourcing it. Nicky’s personal Christmas liturgy is pulled from his favorite prayers, so I didn’t worry too much about denominational concerns.
> 
> Corde natus is one of the oldest hymns about the Incarnation; the text dates to the third century, and it appears in print set to plainsong in the medieval Finnish manuscript Piae Cantiones, one of the loves of my medievalist life. In English is it known as “Of the Father’s Love Begotten.”
> 
> Puer nobis is also found in Piae Cantiones, and is sometimes sung in English as “Unto us a boy is born.”
> 
> In dulci jubilo’s text dates to the fourteenth century, and the tune to the fifteenth. The tune can also be found in, you guessed it, Piae Cantiones (Finland out there doing the MOST for Christmas music nerds such as myself). It’s originally in Latin and German; if you seek a version in English and Latin, I recommend the arrangement by Pearsall, which is in the playlist linked at the beginning of this fic.


End file.
